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                          (?) The Answer Gang (!)
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  Contents:

   [66]¶: Greetings From Heather Stern

   [67](?) Network File Systems.
   [68](?) Making SSH a supported protocol
   [69](?) Urk... Mutt just did something *ST00PID*
   [70](?) Transcoding UTF to ISO8859-1
            ____________________________________________________

(¶) Greetings from Heather Stern

   Hello everyone -- welcome, once again, to the world of The Answer Gang.

   There's a world of people out here doing good things. As my [71]cover art
   raises a cheery note to those who are part of the space programs (not just
   for the USA program, though certainly since that's where I live that's the
   pics I'm looking at) - there's those of us who not only hope for a brighter
   future but make it so, by our heartfelt efforts and getting our hands deep
   in code and craft.

   As good fortune would have it, I'll get to meet a larger batch of them at
   this year's [72]LinuxPicnic than last. And I can reasonably hope I'll see a
   decent batch of you folks at [73]Linux World Expo in my area too.

   Why is this important, you might ask. It's the Internet Age; people live on
   their cellphones, podcast LUG radio reports at each other, spend more time
   in  IRC  than  visiting  their aunts and uncles, mail order things via
   [74]PayPal or other money-kindred and about a billion online stores. Who
   notices that real world thingy? The wattage in the Blue Room is up way too
   high, too. But that's just it -- it may be a big blue room... but it's the
   same world we all live in... and we've all got a much finer chance of doing
   our best if we learn to share the bright marble Nature has granted us.

   Hooray for open source. Have a great Summer, folks. See you next month.
            ____________________________________________________

(?) Network File Systems.

   From mso@oz.net 

  Answered By: Rick Moen, Lew Pitcher, Jimmy O'Regan, Bruce Ferrell, Neil
                                                                Youngman 

   What other choice is there besides Samba? Am I wrong for dismissing Samba
   due to its Microsoft taint? 

   (I do have to use Samba at work. So far it's been fine except I had to use
   the "cifs" filesystem instead of "smbfs". Apparently our server pretends to
   speak the older smbfs but actually doesn't.) 

     (!) [Rick] Well, if you need help disposing of those troublesome spare CPU
     cycles, there's always SFS ([75]http://www.fs.net).

     Personally, my preferred solution is called SMTP, aka "Please drop the
     mail off right here where I am, thanks" -- for values of "where I am"
     equating to "the machine I ssh to, where mutt is left running permanently
     under GNU screen ".

     Tridge's reported solution is to use rsync (what else?) to mirror his mbox
     between his SMTP host and whatever machine he's sitting at.

   (?) OK. I meant for the general problem of mounting remote filesystems, not
   the specific problem of remote mailboxes. 

     (!) [Rick] I have nothing against you changing the focus of the discussion
     in that fashion; I just note that you've done so. Enjoy.

   (?) For that there's only NFS and Samba? (rsync, scp, and ftp don't count :)
   
   It looks like SFS on Linux is built on top of NFS, so I'm not sure it counts
   as a "third" one. [76]http://www.fs.net/sfswww/linux 

   The reason for my question is, there doesn't seem to be a "good" solution
   for sharing filesystems on Linux. For years I keep hearing: 

     NFS: Unreliable! Doesn't play well with file locking!
     Samba: Evil! Microsoft! Proprietary protocol! Embrace and extend!

   So what's the organization that wants a central fileserver to do? 

     (!) [Rick] Take your pick:

    1. AFS, or